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With municipalities controlling more than half of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, any success curtailing the nation’s share of planet-warming emissions hinges on urban centres. Vancouver has been on the vanguard of municipal climate policy in North America, with its trailblazing green building code. The city has already shaved 17 per cent off its carbon footprint from 2007 levels and now has one of the lowest per-person carbon footprints of any major Canadian city. But in November, during a heated city council debate about reinstating natural gas heating in new buildings, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim suggested efforts to curtail emissions were pointless.
“Whether we like it or not, even if we shut down the city of Vancouver it won’t make a difference in decreasing the rate of change of the global worldwide temperatures,” Sim, whose ABC Vancouver party holds a majority on council, said during the debate. “I’m going to support natural gas. If banning it would have an impact, even a minor impact that was measurable, I would change my mind.”
Though the motion to restore natural gas heating failed in a close tie vote, the mayor’s do-nothing stance struck many as especially defeatist for a city on the frontlines of steepening climate impacts.
ABC Coun. Mike Klassen expressed disappointment that neither the federal, provincial nor City of Vancouver governments were on track to meet their emission reduction targets. “I ran for office in part to help change that,” he said, before voting to bring back natural gas furnaces and water heaters, a move city staff noted would potentially generate an additional 65,100 tonnes of annual carbon emissions by 2035, compared to a reduction of 15,900 tonnes per year from electrifying heat and hot water.
Fifty-seven per cent of Vancouver’s greenhouse gas emissions come from burning natural gas in buildings, so Vancouver will be hard-pressed to reach its target of halving emissions by 2030 without decarbonizing heating. While FortisBC is very commendably and voluntarily decarbonizing the natural gas in its lines for all customers by ramping up the percentage of renewable natural gas to 10 per cent by 2030 — a first for North America — the shift is too slow and too expensive to compete with electrification. (Renewable natural gas is essentially a processed biogas, produced by the decomposition of organic matter. It can boast a carbon negative footprint over its life cycle since its combustion as a fuel prevents powerful greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere, but has an acquisition cost roughly 12 times higher than fossil fuel natural gas, according to figures from the British Columbia Utilities Commission.)
Details of city politics around climate policy may seem trivial, but what unfolded at Vancouver city hall last November indicates how deeply embedded the climate information wars and fear-mongering around electrification have become: rife with double standards and unsupported claims that favour fossil fuel interests. The events confirmed Vancouver — a city long known for conscientious environmentalism, the birthplace of Greenpeace with one of the highest electric vehicle adoption rates in the country — has multiple elected officials for whom climate action isn’t a need, or even a want, but a why-bother.
A second strange theme also emerged during the gas ban debate: Klassen’s preoccupation with Norway. Klassen cited the Nordic nation twice in the council chambers as a key factor in why he was voting against the electrification of home heating and hot water.
When it comes to electrification in Norway, there’s a lot to say. The country has the highest heat pump adoption rate in the world. Nine out of 10 vehicles sold in Norway are now electric. And Norway has reduced its national carbon footprint by 13 per cent in the past decade, with two-thirds of those reductions happening in the past five years alone.
But none of these very helpful and germane facts caught Klassen’s attention.
“When I went to do a little more research about precedence, I saw what I would describe as a bit of a cautionary tale from Norway,” he said in his time slot to ask city staff questions about their gas heating report. “Norway ended gas hookups in 2005 but didn’t have enough energy for electricity and heat, so they built three new gas-fired plants — resulting in increased [greenhouse gas] emissions for the country.” He added, “The cost of heating for space now eats up over 15 per cent of average Norwegian disposable income.”
Yet data from Statistics Norway shows that in 2022, household spending on electricity averaged 5.7 per cent — nowhere near the 15 per cent figure Klassen cited.
One small but material detail omitted by Klassen is that Norway never had residential gas infrastructure in the first place, so it didn’t have gas hookups to end. (There is one single, almost immaterial exception in the Stavanger region, where an energy company supplies gas to about 2,500 customers through its network — a mere 0.1 per cent of the country’s 2.38 million households.)
Klassen’s claim that Norway turned to gas power plants to meet residential heating electrical demand also has things backwards. Norway constructed four new natural gas plants between 2007 and 2010, mostly due to what turned out to be overblown concerns about rising electricity prices and power outages from growing electricity demand. In the end, those gas plants could not compete with cheap hydroelectricity.
Two plants, built at great expense in 2008, were decommissioned without ever being put to use. A third was intermittently used over seven years before being sold for parts in 2014. The fourth operates in the heartland of Norway’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) extraction region and is not connected to any residential electrical grid. After operating at a multimillion-dollar loss for several years, the plant was slated to be mothballed, but got a stay of execution during the 2021 European energy crisis.
When I emailed Klassen to ask about the discrepancy between his claims and Statistics Norway data, in reply he sent a treatise about Norway’s electrification and how it has imperilled both affordability and emissions reductions. Klassen’s emailed statement asserted that recurring equipment maintenance costs can “push heating expenses to 12 to 18 per cent of household disposable income.” Statistics Norway data shows average house maintenance costs in 2022 made up only 0.2 per cent of household expenditures, while spending on the “repair, installation and hire of household appliances” didn’t even register statistically.
Robbie Andrew, a senior scientist at the CICERO Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, wrote in an email, “There’s no evidence that those who have installed heat pumps … are surprised by high maintenance costs.”
Habibollah Sadeghi, an engineer at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute in Oslo who authored a 2022 peer-reviewed research paper on the performance of Norwegian heat pumps, replied to me by email to say his personal energy bill was “less than [around] three per cent of my annual income (after tax).” He noted he has no other utility bill, like gas, and that his electricity costs include not just the expense of heating his home but also electric car charging, hot water and more.
In his emailed response, Klassen also contended Norway’s gas ban resulted in households that consume less electricity, often lower income, paying more than four times more per kilowatt-hour of electricity than those with higher electricity consumption, typically wealthier households. “This is simply not correct,” research professor Per Ove Eikeland and senior researcher Tor Håkon Jackson Inderberg, from the independent research foundation Fridtjof Nansen Institute, wrote to me in an email. “Households pay the same price per [kilowatt-hour], irrespective of consumption.” In fact, Norway has some of the lowest energy poverty rates in Europe — 0.8 per cent, compared to the European average of 6.9 per cent.
By email, Klassen asserted, “Norway’s ban on residential natural gas hasn’t reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.” But this, too, appears to be unfounded. “It is wildly untrue to state Norway hasn’t reduced emissions from household heating,” Ketan Joshi, a communications consultant and energy analyst based in Oslo, Norway, emailed in response to my questions. “Since 2010, emissions from burning fossil gas for power and emissions related to household heating have both fallen significantly.” The electrification of heating in Norway has led to an 80 per cent drop in carbon dioxide emissions from heating over the past 30 years.
I responded to Klassen to confirm the source of his long email statement, asking whether the source was a human or artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT. He replied by email, “I often seek expert help on complex issues like energy.” When I pushed again to confirm the source, asking whether the research used to compile his emailed statement was compiled by a human, I did not receive a reply.
Why Klassen is citing such questionable statements from an unnamed source is a mystery. This is the same councillor who opened his question period to staff about the gas ban by saying, “I think we’re all determined to … having a rigorous fact-based decision here.”
Admittedly, this is a lot of time spent chasing down claims made by a city councillor during one single climate policy vote. But it is alarming to consider that elected officials are making decisions on behalf of the public based on an unidentified source. It is impossible to know precisely how much of Klassen’s decision to support gas heating in new buildings is attributable to his understanding of Norway’s energy transition. But he returned to the topic and referenced Norway’s ban on fossil fuel for heating and hot water in his statement before the November vote, saying, “In the case of Norway it has led to Norwegians now using up to 15 per cent of their disposable income to heat space and hot water in their homes. This is something I hope we can avoid in our province.” Vancouverites have a right to know if one of their representatives is justifying their decisions using misinformation, whether it’s derived from AI or human sources.
In November 2023, Sim voted against a motion by Green Party Coun. Adriane Carr to start a youth climate corps in Vancouver. “I truly believe that every single person in this chamber believes that the climate’s changing,” he told council at the time. “And I think all of us are responsible as well. For example, my family, we don’t live a carbon neutral lifestyle, we live a carbon negative lifestyle … We buy tons of offset credits to compensate and then some.”
If Sim were a private citizen instead of an elected representative, and if offsets truly worked (which they only do 12 per cent of the time, according to a research by the Swiss University ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge), this might pass muster. But Sim leads a city of 730,000 residents who collectively produce about 2.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year — an environmental responsibility significantly larger than his household footprint.
Just a year later, the mayor’s tone on climate had swerved to become one of defeatist fatalism. The futility of Vancouver’s emission reduction policies in addressing climate change isn’t worth risking any possible economic downsides, Sim argued in late 2024 — the hottest year on record for global temperatures.
Evidence gathered by city staff found that electrifying heating has no significant downsides for affordability or the speed of housing construction.
Not persuaded, Sim questioned the veracity of his staff’s findings. “It could be great, it could be flawed, it really doesn’t matter,” Sim said about the staff report, which synthesized the results of 21 meetings and interviews with more than 100 participants, including homebuilders associations, utilities, home and multiplex builders and larger developers. Besides, Sim reasoned, if the staff report’s conclusions were correct, “I truly believe everyone would adopt electrification because it would be at the same price with no delay and it’s actually good for our community.”
Sim is expecting builders to do what he, as mayor, would not: cut emissions, even though, in the grand scheme of things, no single decision to build with gas heating or heat pumps would have any bearing whatsoever on the temperature of the entire planet.
The latest projections show the world is on course to reach 3.2 C warming by 2100, in the absence of further emission reduction efforts. The only reason we are no longer on track for the hothouse 5 C temperature hike that was in our future a decade ago is largely because elected leaders implemented greenhouse gas emission reduction policies, in spite of the fact that each policy on its own could never guarantee any change. A multitude of tiny, incremental policy interventions have already drastically improved the outlook. To dismiss the value of municipal efforts, as Sim did, is not just nihilistic — it’s inaccurate.
More than 140 Vancouverites registered to speak to council on this issue, in person or by phone. Those wanting city council to stay the course and ban gas for heating and hot water in new builds (of which I was speaker 29) outnumbered those in favour of reinstating gas heating, seven to one.
However, a shadowy world of influence and bias may be at play. The mayor’s close friend and top-paid advisor David Grewal (who ran with ABC in the last municipal election) is the director of two natural gas companies. Months prior to ABC Coun. Brian Montague first introducing the motion to re-allow gas for heating back into new buildings in July 2024, Grewal and ABC councillors met with Gurpreet Vinning, a registered lobbyist for gas utility FortisBC: first in December 2023, then again in May and June 2024.
As to why Sim and the majority of ABC councillors are leaning so hard in favour of gas interests now, ABC councillor Lisa Dominato pointed out, before voting counter to her party’s majority last November: “Only the natural gas sector and their representatives have been advancing this agenda.”
Shortly after ABC’s motion to reverse the gas ban failed in a tie vote, Sim sat down with Business in Vancouver for an interview.
In it, he was unequivocal about his position, and suggested his council might try a similar motion again, saying, “Personally I was very clear, I support natural gas, I voted for it. We lost the vote. We can’t revisit that for a year.”
If council revisits the gas ban vote late this year, Vancouverites should be ready to fact-check all claims about gas. They should also be prepared to head to the polls and vote in the city’s by-elections for two vacant councillor positions in April. Should Sim’s ABC party secure more council seats, it could gain the majority needed to reverse course on Vancouver’s gas ban and steadily and impressively shrinking carbon footprint.
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